NEW
YORK In October, a film student at New York University pitched an idea
for her video-making class: a four-minute portrayal of the contrast between
unbridled human lust and banal everyday behavior.
Her professor approved. The student,
Paula Carmicino, found two actor friends willing to have sex on camera in front
of the class. The other students expressed their support. But then the professor
thought he should check with the administration, which immediately pulled the
plug on the project.
What's more, university officials said
they would issue a written policy requiring student films and videos to follow
the ratings guidelines of the Motion Picture Association of America, with
nothing racier than R-rated fare allowed, according to Carmicino and her
professor, Carlos de Jesus. The MPAA says R-rated films may include "nudity
within sensual scenes."
The matter has raised a mini-tempest on
campus. On Wednesday, the school newspaper, The Washington Square News,
published a front-page article about it, as well as an editorial critical of the
administration.
Carmicino and de Jesus say the issue
raises far-reaching questions of censorship and academic and artistic freedom.
"This is where you unfold as a creative
artist," Carmicino, 21, said. "You need people to bounce your ideas off of, or
else you won't evolve as an artist." Carmicino is a junior in the film and
television department at the university's Tisch School of the Arts.
The department head and deans involved in
the decision did not respond to telephone messages left Wednesday, and a
spokesman for the Tisch school, Richard Pierce, said they would not be available
to comment. He said he doubted that the matter had reached the university
president, John Sexton.
Pierce said that the school had long had
an unwritten policy that student films should follow industry standards and that
it was now considering putting that policy in writing.
Defending the university, he said NYU was
considered very broad-minded on questions of artistic freedom, but had to draw
the line at videotaping real sex before a class of students. He compared that to
a filmmaker committing arson for a movie about firefighters.
"Someone give me a list of universities
that allow sex acts in the classroom," Pierce said. "We're not going to be the
first."
He also praised Carmicino as a "serious
and valued" student.
"The history of art is replete with
examples of artists producing great art under limitations," Pierce said.
Christopher Dunn, an associate legal
director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said there was no First
Amendment issue involved because the university was a private institution. But,
he said, the decision runs counter to the tradition of academic freedom.
"Students should be able to make films, write books or compose paintings without
their university acting as a moral censor," he said.
De Jesus said he supported the film from
the start. "It did have redeeming values, and it was fine with me, especially
having seen her previous work," he said. "She's a young woman with lots of
integrity." But when he checked with the administration, he said, "All I kept
hearing was, 'No, no, no, she can't do this.'"
Carmicino said she then withdrew the idea
to avoid putting her professor on the spot.
In Carmicino's view, the university is
censoring a work about how people censor their own behavior. She said her video,
titled "Animal," was supposed to depict the contrast between public and private
behavior: "The whole concept of it was to compare the normal behavior of people
in their everyday lives versus the animalistic behavior that comes out when they
are having sex."
She planned to intersperse 30-second
clips of passionate sex with scenes of the couple engaged in more mundane
activities, like watching television and reading a newspaper.
Simulating the sex would have defeated
her purpose, she said. "That's censoring the sex part. My thing is how we censor
ourselves during the day when we're not having sex."
Pierce, the Tisch spokesman, said film
and art students at the university frequently tested limits. Administrators
often have to apply sensible guidelines for provocative works, and rarely draw
media attention when they do so, he said.
Conversations with several Tisch students
sympathetic to Carmicino's efforts made it clear that explicit content in
classroom work was not unusual.
Vera Itkin, 20, a sophomore, said that
one film in a class contained graphic secondhand footage from a pornographic
movie and that two scripts called for hard-core sex scenes, one with dead
people.
Lisa Estrin, 19, a sophomore, said she
made a film showing simulated sex between two stuffed toys, Minnie Mouse and
Lamb Chop.
Carmicino also has the support of her
mother, Theresa Carmicino, a retired social worker in Shelby Township, Michigan,
who said, "It's not subject matter I probably would like, but I think she had
the right to represent herself the way she likes."
Nor was the controversy a surprise.
"Paula's always pushed buttons," her mother said, but she has always backed up
her contrarian positions with sound reasoning.
An official at another school said he had
never heard of a requirement that student films adhere to industry ratings. "We
as a matter of creative course do not censor," said Joe Wallenstein, the
director of physical production at the University of Southern California's
School of Cinema/Television.
While nudity is plentiful in student
projects, he said, the school has never been confronted with an extremely
graphic sexual scene, adding that it was unlikely that such a scene would be
allowed.
In the end, Carmicino made another video
for her class. It consisted of two characters having a conversation in which
every word was bleeped out.
"She did a beautiful piece," de Jesus
said. "I said to the class, 'You see what you can come up with when you feel
real passionately about a subject?'"
Charles Mims
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